Graphing your F5 LTM Environment with Cacti

citizen_elah - did you find a hero? someone who found a way to index the pool name and loop through the pool members for data? i know it's like 2 years later but I just started writing iControl apps and just came across this article describing 'the use of wget' as a data method in place of SNMP - for basically the same reasons.

 

 

so i started thinking, "woah...if cacti supports http as the data input method, i should be able to use that some how with this iControl app, right?"

 

 

right!

 

 

so, i wrote an app that reads in a pool name from the URL, queries the LTM, runs through the pool building the array, then dumps it to the screen in the Cacti format needed...then I just graph it!

 

 

basically, if I have a web_pool with 192.168.1.1:801 and 192.168.1.2:802, where 801 has 23 conns and 802 has 15, then my app runs through that pool, grabs the counters, and then displays it to the screen like this:

 

 

19216811p801:23 19216812p802:15

 

 

then, from Cacti, I use

 

wget --quiet --no-cache -O - http://[server running my app]/default.aspx?pooldata=web_pool

 

 

to grab it!

 

 

it's completely changing the flexibility of what i can graph and how we look at 'what the LTM' is doing and, what's really cool, now, is I am can pull data from both sets of boxes in both of our data centers and merge the data into one graph - so I can get a 'total picture' of all web requests (for example) being handled in both data centers at the same time in one graph!

 

 

anyway, i am just looking on devcentral to see if anyone else has done this so I can contribute. This is the site that got me thinking about it:

 

http://penguinman-techtalk.blogspot.com/2009/03/cacti-graphing-remote-service-without.html